VAST Solid State Flash Array Drive SSFAD Review

Since my days providing content for a couple of non-profits when AOL launched, through today where I run a successful internet marketing company, I have always supported the best possible infrastructures for my online technology. Second only to RAM, storage was my number one priority.

Floppy’s, diskettes, external zip drives, writable CD’s and writable DVD’s and then external hard drives. I started out with a couple Buslink drives and over time, I worked my way up to many of the one to three terabyte drives I have used in the past year. With the use of standard external harddrives, many have failed and I have 6 drives that I have to send off to a data recovery center in California. I currently use a Western Digital 8 TB dual writing harddrive for my storage along with various cloud applications. Even as more solid state drives hit the market they still don’t have the storage capacity that I would need for commercial use.

In 2006 when I was partnered with a company that was the precursor to the likes of Expedia and other companies, we had a server cage at a local co-location facility with a number of Windows and Linux servers. Moving parts, cooling needs and excessive amounts of power are required to run these server systems. Drives are always falling out along with any number of technology failures. I found the solution.

Vast Technology International Corp. has just announced the world’s highest capacity storage drive ever created, the Infini 128 Terabyte (TB) Drive. It is the World’s first Solid State Flash Array Drive (SSFAD), and makes it the undisputed highest storage capacity drive in existence. A link to their crowd funding site can be found here:

The Vast SSFAD technology is available in 2 formats, a pocket sized USB drive called the Panther with capacity up to 16 terabytes, and a 3.5 inch internal or external drive with a capacity up to 128 terabytes.

16 TB in a USB drive? I was exited when I had a tech company give me a 65 Gig flash drive.

First revealed in March of 2016, the Vast Raptor SSFAD currently comes in 5 different capacity sizes: 16TB, 25TB, 32TB, 64TB and 128TB (for high end enterprise users). The drives will have 3 types of interface options: 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, 6Gb/s SATA3 Interface for use in enterprise storage systems and for our external Vast Infini unit it comes with 6Gb/s USB3.0/3.1.

So on the low end I can carry a small USB drive with terabyte storage in my pocket but I feel the large commercial data storage market has the most potential. Based upon the images below when you look at the size of the physical VASTdrive storage unit and the much lower power requirements, data storage costs would be a fraction of what they are now.

From what I understand, the product line will start shipping in early 2017.